Drew Taylor

One of the most unique and unforgettable movies in Pixar’s grand pantheon.

In a movie as visually stunning as Encanto, it’s the depth of its empathy that might be its most miraculous feature.

Sing 2 is like having a mainstream radio station on in the background. It’s enjoyable and not in the least bit challenging. And sometimes that’s enough.

This movie will fill your heart up. Casarosa is an artist with a true perspective, fearless in his creative impulses and limitless in his compassion, and Luca is a pure expression of these sensibilities.

It’s hard to argue with too many of the decisions considering what a fitfully entertaining and satisfying entry it really is. This is a movie stuffed (perhaps overstuffed) with moments that will make you gasp, giggle and applaud, whether this is your first “Fast and Furious” movie or you’re a longtime fan.

While lacking the surprise and simplicity of the original “Frozen,” the sequel is still largely wonderful in its own right. It fearlessly transforms the original characters and even its own storytelling format, eschewing the familiar for something grander and more complex.

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is one of the biggest surprises at the movies this summer. In fact, it’s downright super.

It would have been a relief if, 14 years later, Incredibles 2 had simply met expectations. Instead, it exceeds them.

For a movie that preaches the importance of dinosaur freedom, it’s hard to watch something so caged by its terrible plotting and predictability.

At its best, Pacific Rim Uprising is tedious and mildly diverting, but at its worst it feels like an out-and-out betrayal.

Thankfully, Coco, Pixar’s latest original work and one of their very best, truly does transport you. The results are magical and feel somewhat rebellious given the current political climate, which makes the film feel even more special.

Overlong and joyless, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a giant, opulent express train trapped in the snow, heaving and off balance. Buy another ticket. Skip this train.

Even with these minor complaints, it’s hard to deny that It is anything but a triumph. The craftsmanship is impeccable, the performances incredibly strong..., and the fidelity to the source material, in spirit more than specificity, is admirable and appreciated. Had the story given even more time to breathe, it would have been one of the greatest Stephen King adaptations ever. As it stands, it’s simply a very good one.

If anything can happen (and, trust me, it does), then there’s never a way of predicting where the next scare will come from. And for a genre that oftentimes feels threadbare and hopelessly predictable, this cannot be commended enough.

This is a brilliantly constructed, whip-smart, and laugh-out-loud-funny romp from a filmmaker whose precision and craft is nearly unparalleled. It’s hard to think of a movie this year that has been as singularly delightful, one that, with each passing moment, reveals something charming or odd or real.

There have been countless films this summer that have engaged in endless spectacle but Dunkirk is the rare blockbuster that will leave a bruise.

The entire thing feels forced and hollow, less an authentic expression of the human experience and more a gee-whiz exercise in cleverness, slathered in a healthy coat of multiplex-friendly weirdness.

The main thing you’ll feel from Cars 3 is joy; this is Pixar at its most radiant and playful.

Ritchie’s ‘King Arthur’ is a pleasing big budget spectacle, oddly aligned to the filmmaker’s thematic interests and startlingly compatible with his signature razzle-dazzle style. In fact, the soggiest moments in the movie are the ones that adhere the closest to that ambitious multi-film strategy, lessening the fun, and emptying its impact.

What’s interesting is watching the way that Lin has to maneuver in and out of the limitations that the franchise has established, while attempting to push it into new territory.

Movies today are too long and overstuffed; Life is lean, mean, and terrifying. It doesn’t have much to say beyond “hold up, maybe we shouldn’t poke around uncharted terrain so much,” but with actors this committed, set pieces this exciting, and direction this confident, it doesn’t really matter.

It also cannot be overstated what an asset [John C.] Reilly is. The moment he shows up, the movie feels enlivened and energized; his mere presence adds a tremendous amount of oddball charm and humor.

What keeps The Royal Road from feeling like its trapped in amber is the genuine heartbreak that Olson clearly feels, the rawness of her emotions and her dedicated willingness to share.

In the end, it doesn't matter if you believe Alexandrovich's story that a $7 billion weapons system was ultimately the cause of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown; what matters is that Alexandrovich believes it so completely. And through his eyes (which seem to bug out outside of his skull), the entire Russia/Ukraine relationship takes on a vivid, personal immediacy.

Completely forgettable, Hellions is far less cool, smart, and scary than it thinks it is.

Creep is a tiny movie whose uniqueness feels positively seismic. If there's one thing Creep has, it's an abundance of personality, and that cannot be understated.

The documentary, like its subject, is unapologetically dazzling.

Deeply human, full of dread simmering just beneath the surface and quietly unsettling.

Gabriel often feels like a feat, for both writer/director Howe and Culkin. It's a movie that might not be easy to watch, but is well worth the effort.

The marketing engine of Minions is undeniably powerful. This is something craftily designed to sell toys and theme park tickets and special cans of Tic-tacs. But it’s not a movie. It’s an eyesore.

Ted 2 gives lip service to civil liberties and spends the rest of the running time picking the easiest joke to tell, again and again and again.

It's ultimately a convoluted, muddy (both literally and figuratively) and overlong bore that takes an intriguing premise and does absolutely nothing with it.

Unfriended is sometimes a blast to watch and is occasionally funny and unnerving, but by its conclusion it becomes screechy and overwrought.

At its heart, Raiders! is an underdog story, and as with any underdog story, it becomes even more compelling as the stakes are continually raised against our heroes.

If DreamWorks Animation is hoping to get back on track with this movie, a lavish sci-fi comedy based on a recent children's book, they're pretty much doomed.

A dumb, loud action movie that aspires to forcibly entertain and provoke thought but fails miserably.

It's an absolutely horrible, amateurishly assembled comedy that is more offensive than just about anything we've seen lately, a non-stop parade of racist, homophobic bile that would be bad enough from any comedian, but coming out of Ferrell and Hart has the effect of watching a childhood hero committing some horrible act.

Feig's commitment to the genre, and some truly wonderful set pieces, make Spy as lovable as its main character.

A film that double-underlines the fact that Collet-Serra knows exactly what to do with Neeson's on-screen persona in what is ultimately their most satisfying film yet.

Unfinished Business is the type of movie that is so awful that as it rolls along (its 91-minute runtime feels agonizing) you get more and more restless.

Between the charming Copley performance, the ingenious visuals, the absolutely incredible all-electronic Hans Zimmer score (seriously, this is one of his best ever), and the propulsive narrative thrust (Blomkamp is rarely singled out for how swiftly he moves things along, plot holes be damned), there is a lot to appreciate and even love about Chappie.

Bringing someone back from the dead is one of the horror genre's oldest and most effective tropes, but with The Lazarus Effect, it just seems tired.

Digging Up the Marrow could have been an effective riff on Barker's "Nightbreed," but instead becomes just another found footage horror lark, with occasionally nifty effects and an overriding sense that Green's ego, and not a wonderful Ray Wise performance, is what the movie is really about.

While McFarland, USA doesn't reinvent the wheel (in fact, it makes "Million Dollar Arm" seem even more abstract, due to its virtual absence of actual sports), it does deliver in all the ways you expect that a Disney sports movie should: it's heartwarming, handsome, and features an exceptional Costner performance at its center.

Nothing in Seventh Son is compelling, interesting or noteworthy, though you can feel the strain of the filmmakers attempting to set up a potential franchise.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water is a mild lark. It's odd, off-the-wall, and has enough jokes and gags that if you're forced to take your little one to the theater, you won't spend the entire time looking at your watch or planning your escape.

All of the young actors are committed, and director Dean Israelite has a good handle on the material, offering his own contributions to the time travel genre (like how violent the act itself is) while continually tipping his hat to what came before it.

Lynch has a sure hand... The camera moves but never feels overly active, and within the first few minutes the geography of the apartment is so brilliantly laid out that you feel like you could navigate your way around blindfolded. It has a nice tempo, with the appropriate lulls in the action and some surprising reveals.

A limp psychosexual thriller that takes a promisingly trashy conceit... and does absolutely nothing with it, and saddles it with wooden performances, poor staging, and a complete lack of conviction. It reaches a nearly operatic level of ineptitude.

Strange Magic is messy and uneven and occasionally annoying, but it also dares to be different.

Stretch is a truly enjoyable oddity, a movie that was too brash, too weird, too idiosyncratic for a major release, but one that should settle into a nice, long shelf life. Stretch is a wild ride, and one very much worth going on.

It might be slight, but Loitering With Intent is fast, funny, and incredibly heartfelt. And sometimes that's enough.

There are so many interesting ideas and concepts that could have been spun from this framework. Instead, it's the work of a bunch of filmmakers who seemingly wanted to offer up a WTF-worthy twist ending and tried to reverse engineer a movie from it.

Vaughn and his collaborators have taken a crude and disposable property and turned it into something more – a thoughtful, exciting, whip-smart spy adventure that doesn't let its smart-ass post-modernism overwhelm its playfulness or its heart.

Night at the Museum was always the best when it was closest to complete anarchy, tapping into the zippy, good-natured malevolence of filmmakers like Joe Dante, but here that energy is gone, replaced by a kind of sleepy noncommittal attitude. The magic has dried up; the museum is closed forever.

It's a found footage movie that feels instantly dated, even with its supposed political undertones. It's creaky, laborious, and not, in the least bit, scary.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is easily the best film of the new trilogy, more entertaining and energetic and tonally in sync with Jackson's earlier, edgier work, shifting from berserker comedy to abject horror at a moment's notice (and then back again).

Exodus: Gods and Kings is a creaky, sometimes painfully boring Old Testament slog, and finds the visionary director unable to successfully wrangle a human story out of a tale of gods and kings.

In zany set piece after zany set piece, the movie sets itself apart as willing to try anything, do anything for laugh, and it succeeds more often than it fails, even when falling back on some creaky wordplay and the occasional over-emphasis on both fart gags and pop culture references.

The fact that the sequel is a messy, dull, instantly forgettable trifle somehow makes it the perfect follow-up to the original -- it's just as horrible.

What We Do In the Shadows is the type of little movie that you watch and feel like you've discovered something really special. It's a total surprise; a silly, scary delight.

The original film was unpredictable and loose and every so often gave up the aura of dangerousness. If anything, the sequel is a tepid, watered down, and at 100-minutes oftentimes boring attempt to recapture the magic but without any of the whimsy.

The story is so poorly-plotted, nonsensical, and misogynist that it's hard to imagine one person liking this material, much less millions of literate book lovers.

This is a movie primarily concerned with numbers and the way that information is fed, processed, and acted upon. But it plays like the greatest paranoid thriller since "All the President's Men."

Yes, it’s funny and charming and sometimes deeply amusing. But at the same time it lacks any kind of emotional resonance.

He's a romantic and a psychopath and creature of the night. Sadly, Dracula Untold, with its humorless aura and been-there-done-that feel, doesn't allow Evans to inhabit many of these aspects. Instead, Dracula Untold feels largely uninspired.

It's just a bore, barely registering as a movie (visually, it looks more like an USA cable series), which is a shame, because with the oddball cast and somewhat notable director, it could have been fun and trashy. Instead, it's just forgettable.

If "subtle" horror movies are going to be this devastatingly boring, maybe it's time to bring back the buckets of blood.

The Boxtrolls charms, in every way it can – with its gorgeous animation style that combines lo-fi with high-tech (the puppets were printed using 3D printers), with the huggable nature of the characters, and with the boldness of its storytelling and thematic concerns.

While The Town That Dreaded Sundown is ambitious and supremely weird, it fails to cohere into something more resonant.

There are enough pleasures going on in John Wick to elevate it above just another dumb action movie.

Fans of the novel might get some minor thrills from the big screen adaptation, but it's hard to understand what made the material so popular in the first place.

Somehow, No Good Deed finds a way to be exploitative and creepy wherever it can.

At it’s best, Tusk is outlandishly unforgettable.

It offers a handful of effective moments and some characters that are fun to watch squirm through muck and bones, but not much more than that, especially when the films spins out of control towards its conclusion.

If you’re not looking for reinvention and loved the first "Sin City," then you'll probably love this one too. It's a gorgeous-to-look-at, brain-splattered case of "more of the same."

In the new documentary To Be Takei, it becomes clear that Takei is a man who defies expectations and subverts stereotypes at virtually every turn. It’s just a shame the movie wasn’t as progressive as its subject.

“No No” is a jazzy, joyful exploration of a man that, if he wasn’t able to actually change the system, was at least happy with giving it the middle finger.

There have been some reports that this is the last entry in the series, but it feels like the franchise is (finally) just getting started. "The Expendables 4" anyone?

Made in America proves that the American dream is undeniably powerful, even to those who have accomplished so much that they have to appreciate it in a form that borders on the abstract.

At 100-minutes, the movie drags and drags until finally losing steam in the last act and then collapses into a pile of worn out platitudes, limp gross out gags and gooey sentiment.

The specificity of the documentary, staying within the walls of the boot camp for virtually the entire movie, is one of its biggest strengths since it is able to place you right alongside these kids.

Planes: Fire and Rescue serves as a dramatic improvement over the original, introducing thrilling action sequences backed by actual stakes and an unexpected emotional dimension, all on top of upgraded animation and a greater emphasis on character.

All in all, Earth to Echo is passable family entertainment, neither unforgettable nor particularly bad.

Tammy is a boring, unfunny road movie that limps along idly, consisting of a string of nonsensical set pieces and halfhearted stabs at character development that come across as off-putting and odd.

Under the Electric Sky shows you the transformative, incredibly positive power of dance music, but in terms of a movie, it falls a little flat.

What Ping Pong Summer lacks in conviction or ingenuity, it makes up for in heart. The nostalgia that the entire film is built upon doesn’t seem misplaced.

It’s a lifeless, meandering, overlong (116 minutes!) trudge through the oversized ego of its creator, full of wrong-headed humor and inept filmmaking.

Maleficent desperately tries to create a character whose motivation you will understand and empathize with. But the screenplay and direction are such a tangled, thorny patch of conflicting ideas that it's hard to tell what that motivation is supposed to be.

A movie that is, in its subtle way, as offensive and mean-spirited as anything Sandler has done, but in a way that is so cuddly, there's the possibility it could, somehow, go unnoticed.

What's interesting about Proxy is that it plays with all of the ephemera associated with pregnancy – the way that a person's psychology can warp around it – but too often gets bogged down in B-movie clichés and an unnecessarily convoluted narrative that strives for profundity but comes across as crass and dull.

It's a different kind of Disney sports movie, more textured, gently spiritual and warmly idiosyncratic, but one that still, before the credits roll, will make you want to stand up and cheer.

If The Protector 2 was dour, then it would also become totally unconvincing. Sure, it's silly, but it's also wildly entertaining and sprinkled with some nice emotional beats. As long as Tony Jaa keeps losing his elephant, we'll keep showing up to watch him track it down.

Unfortunately, this low budget chiller is unable to capture the same kind of awe and terror that made "The Thing" so powerful, although its attempt to be more character-based and emphasis on practical effects is somewhat admirable. Somewhat.

While the movie is not without its charms, there's nothing indicating that it's actually a Hammer movie.

In Brick Mansions Walker is understated and tough, a continued testament to his frequently overlooked accomplishments as a performer. You just wish the movie surrounding him was better.

What's amazing about the documentary, though, is that it's oftentimes just as engaging as the Disney bears that play in jug bands or crave ooey-gooey honey.

Draft Day isn’t a movie that is going to change lives or shift paradigms, but it is entertaining, and assembled with care and attention to detail.